User:Eleanorg/thesis/draft1.1/radical grammar

When I interviewed Reclaim The Night organizer and facilitator Clare Cochrane (2013), she emphasised the need for both "simplistic slogans on marches" at the same time as a deeper, long-term exploration of consent. While defending the continued need for reductionist slogans, she articulated passionately the problems with this conventional model of consent. Of the conventional "B consents to A" grammar, she said,

"as a feminist, I want to scotch that. That's a simplistic notion of consent, which is that... one person says, "I want to do this, will you do it?", and the other person says yes or no. And if they say yes you go ahead and do it, and if they say no you don't. Ok, look, if that's as far as you can get in a certain situation, that's better than nothing. ...But a fuller understanding of consent is not just that one person is agreeing to what the other person wants. ...in the end all you've got is a signature." (Cochrane 2013)

My friend the artist Dave Young's (2013a) project "Yet Another Collaborative Editor" (YACE) shows how this conservative, outcome-driven grammar of consent can be encoded in tools for collaborative production - and illustrates nicely the coercion it produces. Through "a hyper-democratic system" (Young 2013b - collision talk), users can submit text to a collaboratively-written document via a web interface. The catch is that every submission must be voted on by every other user before another piece of text can be submitted, and if anyone votes 'no' the sentence is discarded. There is a strict time limit after which no more sentences can be added, and the document is saved for .PDF export. So: when a concrete outcome is demanded, when there is limited time with no mechanism for discussion, and when proposals are not modifiable, the undemocratic and coercive nature of our working grammar of consent is revealed. Young's description of YACE as "a hyper-democratic system" is thus not strictly accurate, reflecting the common but mistaken conflation of this perfunctory grammar with consent itself.

How, then, to reimagine this grammar? Thomas Millar's (2008) essay "Towards a Performance Model of Sex" gives us a useful starting point. For Millar, our working grammar (what he calls our 'model') of sexual interaction is to blame for the perfunctory signature-seeking of the "get a yes" attitude. As long as sex - and thus consent - are conceptualized as "a substance that can be given, bought, sold or stolen" (p.30), then the logic of the market will define acceptable standards of consent. These will necessarily be impoverished, because "in order for commerce to flourish it is necessary to have rules about when someone is stuck with the bargain they made, even if they regret it or never really liked it in the first place." (p.37). We must accept that "a deal is a deal, however reluctantly, grudgingly, or desperately one side accepts it" (p.37). This grim outlook is lent some support by the tellingly economic logic of Wertheimer's (consent to sexual relations) comment that "by adopting the principle that consent is (ordinarily) /sufficient/ to legitimize interaction, we encourage mutually beneficial interactions" (p.124). More bluntly, "we are not interested in consent as a metaphysical problem, but because it renders it permissible for A to engage in sexual relations with B. [In defining it] we ask 'what could do that'?" (p.146).

Of course, as activists we are free not only to ask what we should render permissible, but what we might render possible in a much broader sense. Getting beyond the conservative grammar of 'permission' opens up exciting possibilities for consent as a more radical model of equal collaboration.

In order to priviledge "affirmative participation", Millar (2008, p.38) proposes rejecting the view of sex as a commodity over which deals must be struck, in favour of a model in which sex (read: any social interaction) is a collaborative performance. "Like the commodity model, the performance model implies a negotiation, but not an unequal or adversarial one. The negotiation is the creative process of building something from a set of available elements" (ibid, p.38). Millar closes with some reflections on what this collaboration could look like: "The palette available to them [the musical or sexual collaborators] is their entire skillset... and the product will depend on the pieces each individual brings to the performance. This process involves communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meets with acceptance or rejection" (ibid, p.39).

Rachel Kramer-Bussel (2008) titles her contribution to the same anthology, "Beyond Yes or No: Consent as a Sexual Process". She claims that "consent is not simply a legal term, and should encompass more than simply yes or no" (ibid, p.44). For her, "'consent' encompasses the ways we ask for sex, and the ways we don't. It's about more than the letter of the law, and... at its heart is communication." (ibid, p.43) In opposition to legal pragmatists such as Kleinig and Wertheimer, for Kramer-Bussel, /asking/ (as well as aquiescing) is part of consent. The gendered distiction between asker and consenter is erased here, in favour of "an open dialogue" (p.48) which echoes Millar's call for consent as a "collaboration" based on "affirmative participation".

What is most striking about these proposals for a re-worked grammar of consent (which I will call 'consent-as-collaboration') is that consent is no longer an outcome, but must be a process in and of itself. This is not surprising when we think, for example, of the differences between democratic systems based on voting, and those based on consensus. If the aim is a decision made collectively (instead of a 'yes'/'no' vote), then the proposal to be consented to can no longer be static and self-evident; it must be modifiable. The process of proposing, discussing and modifying a proposal therefore cannot be divorced from the ultimate confirmation of agreement. So what does this collaborative process of negotiation look like?